âMore generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?â
This is very difficult philosophical territory, but I guess my instinct is to draw a distinction between:
a) ignoring new evidence about what properties something has, because that would overturn your prior moral evaluation of that thing.
b) Deciding that well-known properties of a thing donât contribute towards it being bad enough to overturn the standard evaluation of it, because you are committed to the standard moral evaluation. (This doesnât involve inferring that something has particular non-moral properties from the claim that it is morally good/âbad, unlike a).)
A) feels always dodgy to me, but b) seems like the kind of thing that could be right, depending on how much you should trust judgments about individual cases versus judgements about abstract moral principles. And I think I was only doing b) here, not a).
Having said that, I remember a conversation I had in grad school with a faculty member who was probably much better at philosophy than me claimed that even a) is only automatically bad if you assume moral anti-realism.
âMore generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?â
This is very difficult philosophical territory, but I guess my instinct is to draw a distinction between:
a) ignoring new evidence about what properties something has, because that would overturn your prior moral evaluation of that thing.
b) Deciding that well-known properties of a thing donât contribute towards it being bad enough to overturn the standard evaluation of it, because you are committed to the standard moral evaluation. (This doesnât involve inferring that something has particular non-moral properties from the claim that it is morally good/âbad, unlike a).)
A) feels always dodgy to me, but b) seems like the kind of thing that could be right, depending on how much you should trust judgments about individual cases versus judgements about abstract moral principles. And I think I was only doing b) here, not a).
Having said that, I remember a conversation I had in grad school with a faculty member who was probably much better at philosophy than me claimed that even a) is only automatically bad if you assume moral anti-realism.